The nadir of politics
It was not a week for politicians to be proud of their chosen profession. By voting against extending the contentious citizenship law, as they had done for the last 18 years, opposition MKs preferred to put the country’s citizens at risk and let the bill expire just to demonstrate how rickety the ragtag coalition is.
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which has somehow become known as the Family Reunification Law, was originally passed in 2003, deemed by the government as a vital security measure needed to combat terrorism during the height of the suicide attack carnage during the Second Intifada.
It overturned a process that began in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. From the early 1990s, Israel began granting residency or citizenship to an average of 12,000 Arab-Israelis per year for family reunification, including children.
As Jerusalem Post political correspondent Jeremy Sharon reported this week, one of those Palestinians was Shadi Tubasi, who, it turned out, was a Hamas member in addition to being the husband of an Israeli-Arab woman.
In March 2002, he killed 16 Israelis and wounded 40 more when he blew himself up at a Haifa restaurant. Authorities concluded that Tubasi’s blue Israeli identity card significantly contributed to his ability to mingle freely in Israeli society and position himself to carry out his terrorist attack.
Tubasi was not the only one. In 2003, the state told the High Court that 23 Palestinians who had received citizenship or residency through family reunification – a tiny fraction of those who were granted that status – had “provided meaningful assistance in hostile activity against state security” during the Second Intifada. According to security assessments, 45 Israelis were killed and 124 were wounded in attacks in which those Palestinians were involved.
In the aftermath of the bombing and that data, the Interior Ministry froze the reunification process, saying they feared further attacks by naturalized West Bank Palestinians. A year later, that policy was made into the citizenship law, which required annual renewal by the Knesset.
Like clockwork, regardless of who’s been at the helm in Israel, the bill has been renewed, with the overarching consideration being that security is the number one priority. For the past 12 years, it has been Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud who have pushed those considerations.
At a Yamina faction meeting Monday ahead of the Knesset vote to once again extend the law, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett provided a Shin Bet assessment that the non-renewal of the bill would present a security risk.
“The position of the Shin Bet is that the family reunification of residents from the West Bank and Gaza presents security risks, compared to those who request family reunification from other places. They are more prone to be recruited by terror organizations, and therefore more likely to carry out lone-wolf attacks,” said a legal adviser to the Prime Minister’s Office during a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, also ahead of the vote.
A chart accompanying the remarks showed, however, that the number of such attacks had dwindled down to nearly zero in the ensuing years since their height during the Second Intifada, a testament to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people affected by the bill are law-abiding Palestinians and Israelis who simply want to live together as husband and wife.
Today, is the law still required? Those that oppose it claim that it’s totally discriminatory and simply a convenient crutch that keeps the number of non-Jewish residents of Israel down and maintains a Jewish demographic edge – a claim that some supporters acknowledge is a secondary benefit.
However, putting that aside, the security aspect cannot be underestimated. Even one rotten apple who betrays the rights given to him by Israel and perpetrates a terror attack is justification to keep it in place, at least according to the Shin Bet’s assessments.
But despite the law, and the risks, being virtually the same as when it had been approved in previous years, (in a nod to Ra’am – the United Arab List, the law was going to be extended by six months, during which time a panel would have been set up in order to examine more long-term humanitarian solutions), this time, all MKs from Likud, the Religious Zionist Party, United Torah Judaism and Shas, save one, voted against the law, together with the Joint List of Arab parties. In addition, two of the four Ra’am MKs gave a nay vote, along with Yamina MK Avichai Chikli, which doomed the bill to fall, and exposed the deep divisions within the coalition’s rightand left-wing flanks.
The Ra’am MKs, Chikli and the Joint List voted according to their underlying ideology. The opposition MKs, who had all along supported the bill, voted against it out of sheer politics – putting their desperate desire to make life difficult for the coalition way above their commitments to keeping their constituents safe.
There are apparently three schools of thought regarding the citizenship law. There are those, including the Arab parties, Meretz and humanitarian organizations, who consider it racist legislation targeting Palestinians and refer to it by its more accurate nickname – the “Family Separation Law” – because that is what it in essence does.
There are those, like most members of the coalition, who consider it to be a necessary law, not only for security reasons but also for demographic measure, in order to ensure a Jewish majority in the country.
And then there are those who don’t really care about any of those issues, but are only concerned with regaining power and control of the government. If a few people happen to become victims of terror attacks as a result, it’s the sacrifice that must be made.
The opposition, led by the Likud, thought it would embarrass the coalition by defeating the citizenship bill this week. In doing so, they only brought shame upon themselves.